I don't like the winning one, it is a crude hybrid if the existing flag, and the silver fern flag. It is not normal to to have any country emblem on the flag either. The fern also does look right, and I don't like the way it is also used as a mechanism to divide the colours, it is just crude design wise. The only flag like flag was the red peak one, but it was a flawed design, as it needed some link to the old flag, such as stars, otherwise it was always going to fail. Pretty much 17 million down the drain, which would have been better spent funding life saving drugs.

This is th sort of thing you get when people with no design taste, pick a flag designed by amateurs, chosen from a range of designs decided by a committee. It was a totally glad e process, proven by the fact that red peak was added afterwards. It should have all been done by professional designers.

mattwnz: I don't like the winning one, it is a crude hybrid if the existing flag, and the silver fern flag. It is not normal to to have any country emblem on the flag either. The fern also does look right, and I don't like the way it is also used as a mechanism to divide the colours, it is just crude design wise. The only flag like flag was the red peak one, but it was a flawed design, as it needed some link to the old flag, such as stars, otherwise it was always going to fail. Pretty much 17 million down the drain, which would have been better spent funding life saving drugs.

This is th sort of thing you get when people with no design taste, pick a flag designed by amateurs, chosen from a range of designs decided by a committee. It was a totally glad e process, proven by the fact that red peak was added afterwards. It should have all been done by professional designers.

17 million is nothing (Relative to total money spent on everything annually). Could have been spent on better things possibly, but not everything needs to be spent on life saving measures :)

Lots of people including professional designers, put forward offerings. Ultimately a committee had to select some, ultimately there are going to be some people who will never agree no matter what gets picked, you can't keep everyone happy.

I wasn't a big fan of red peak either and disliked the way it got added... but I will say one thing about it - it does scale nicely. Even the slight downscaling on that preliminary results page makes almost all the choices except red peak look like jaggy pixelated messes (though whoever resized them did a particularly bad job and jpeg...) Whereas red peak looks decent and identifiable even very small:

(sorry this has probably been hashed out elsewhere already but it was very noticable to me on that results page)

SO much money is spent on Education, another 17 Million would have done nothing. If you want more benefit to money spent on education, make the existing money be used more efficiently.

Although you could say that about any money that gets spent, although 17 millions isn't insignificant. However as quoted in teh media a few weeks ago, 17 million would have paid for that new Melanoma Drug for a year, for those people that need it which I believe has been proven to have dramatic effects and prolong life, without the horrible side effects of other treatments.

If it happens, I wonder how much the National Anthem referendum is going to cost? I hope they don't run it in the same way, and hire professionals to come up with compositions.

a) Everyone quotes similar sums of money; but these figures are rarely attributed to a reliable source, so how to we know they are valid?b) People seem to consider this as "lost" money, which "would have been better spent on XXXX".

However, it is reasonable to suppose that most of the money spent on the referendum is being introduced into the NZ economy and circulated anyway; to the benefit of a whole bunch of people. I'm sure a lot of the amounts of money being paid are in the form of wages/salaries for various people (for example, the people who get to count the votes), OR for services in the NZ market (for example, paying for the production and printing of the paperwork; the postage; the advertising, etc). In most cases, that "services" money will go into the pockets of those people providing the service, or employed by the service provider. And a certain percentage will be returned to the Government in the form of tax anyway.

"Wasted" money? Not really."Helping the NZ economy"? Probably."Keeping honest Kiwi's in work"? Well, in the case of NZ Post; absolutely! What else do they actually deliver to people's houses these days??? :-)

I agree James and a good point. Much of the cost will re circulate into the economy by way of wages earned, services provided by the private sector, and an amount of the private to public money movements will be spent by the earners in the economy.

I like the flag.

1. It seperates us from Australia, a very similar flag2. Black is NZ's icon colour, fern is not as iconic as the kiwi but its close. Southern Cross shows some link to the old flag.

New flag? No. Its an update to the old flag, removing Union Jack, adding NZ fern and black colour to make it a NZ flag not a Commonwealth flag